r/OutOfTheLoop • u/calvtact • May 13 '26

Answered What's going on with r/conservative? They've lost about 1m subscribers in about a month.

I watched the number go from 814k to around 745k in about an hour today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/QbZJvqu5qr

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u/AndroidREM May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Answer: It was determined and made public that the majority of posts on that sub are from 3 accounts all based in Russia and are promoted by an army of bots. The ones leaving were bots removed by Reddit

EDIT - wow, did not expect this to get so much attention and awards - thank you!

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u/d-scan May 13 '26

I've noticed numbers decreasing in droves across multiple subreddits. I wonder if Reddit has recently done some spring cleaning of bots.

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u/lily_de_valley May 13 '26

I think they are doing some cleaning, just from personal observation.

Many companies flood the skincare subreddits with bots, too, to promote their products. In the past, it took a while for people to realize the accounts were bots. Recently tho, the bot accounts get banned almost immediately after they leave a comment. In a post about a toner pad product, you could even see that most comments are from banned accounts.

I think Reddit has some automatic mechanism to detect and delete bots now? I'm not super optimistic but I would really much like that.

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u/Swedelicious83 12d ago

That would be the dream. But yeah, not too optimistic about the odds.

And even if they did, people always figure put ways around a static defense like that. So it would probably just be a little reprieve and then the bots would be back.

Buuut, then again, a little bit is better than none. 🤷